Posts by Henry Wertz 1

Splitting hairs, or...?

First off... the central banks of many nations are behaving quite dangerously and irresponsibly, there's truly no reason to say dollars (or pounds) are a solid way to store your wealth but BitCoins are not.

That out of the way... if an "unknown party" was "fraudulently" operating Mt. Gox, couldn't that be a hack (or as they call it now a "cyber attack"?) (Clearly it's not the SAME attack as the 1% of bitcoins but still) .Or are they pretty sure iy's fraud by someone at Mt. Gox and just not sure who specifically?

"In this case, just publicly reveal that "NtApphelpCacheControl()" has a bug, then after 15 days release that is doesn't properly check permissions, then 15 days after that release info about the security tokens, and so on"

That'd be useless I think.

1) Microsoft already had a full *90 days* to fix this bug. This isn't like a few holes where the fix might break other behavior or is complex, or where the fix has to be patched into many products (like a few JPEG or SSL flaws where -- on Windows -- the flawed JPEG or SSL code was usually "built in" to each software instead of them all using a single shared library with the code in it.) I simply have no sympathy, there have been FAR too many cases where commercial companies (not just Microsoft...) will string some security company on for months, 6 months, 9 months, a year, "Oh be responsbile, don't release that exploit yet!". Eventually either blackhats or a second security company (who will not wait to release) re-discovers the flaw (and get the credit) and lo and behold! They manage to put out a patch (that they claimed they needed months or more to do) within a week or two.

2) Once someone says "NtApphelpCacheControl() has a bug", it'll probably take some blackhat (if it hasn't been found already) less than a day to poke around, find the flaw, and have full exploit code ready. And again, they already had 90 days to fix it, another 15 or 30 is just keeps the hole exploitable for longer.

How much was used before?

How much was used before? If ios8 like doubled in size, I could see there being room for complaint (losing like 2GB on a 8GB storage system is a big deal). If it's like 100MB bigger they're just bitching IMHO. Keep in mind that Apple senselessly disallows SD card use with their phones so once your out of space your f**ked buddy (not only not building an SD card slot in, but they produced *one* SD Card reader for IPads, artificially disabling support for it on iphones.)

Keep in mind, Microsoft got sued for the same thing -- they managed to come out with a WinPhone8 that was, what, like 20GB? So people sued, they bought a "32GB" phone and found they had like 12GB available.

Ran out of time to edit my last post..

I just wanted to add, there ARE plenty of wealthy to very wealthy investors who either got lucky or were flat-out shrewd investors. Warren Buffet I'm looking at you! That said, Buffet's flat-out said that he thinks he should be taxed much higher than he is now. He's also pointed out these wealthy really SHOULD worry about the middle and lower class. He figures (and it sounds logical to me) they are the backbone of the economy, if they only have enough income to pay their rent and cheap food and have no discretionary income left over, then sales of these discretionary items will drop off (games and game systems, movies both in theater on DVD/Bluray and online, nicer clothes, nice places to go out to eat, all vacation-related items like hotel rooms, airline tickets, to name a few...) and the diminshed market for these items would lead to the economy continuing to shrink in a sort of downward spiral.

"It's possible that this was not a commercial offering, but I sat in a car in Milton Keynes in 1981 and made a mobile phone call to the USA, so this 1986 date seems all wrong to me. From memory the phone I used was a true cellular car phone with a numeric keypad, single line numeric led display, and a diplexer and tx gear in the boot."

At least here in the US, (this is all per Wikipedia...) the MTS (mobile telephone system) relied on operators; but IMTS (*Improved* Mobile Telephone System) was automated.

It would send out a tone to mark a channel idle (the phone would scan for and lock onto the idle channel). If a call was coming in, it'd use a different tone to say a call's coming in, then pulse dialing (using two tones) to pulse out which phone the call's going to (the other phones would realize the channel's no longer idle and scan for the idle channel). The phone would send out a "seize" tone to be able to signal you've heard the phone ringing and picked up the handset. If you make an outgoing call on this system, the phone did the "seize" tone to signal it wants to make an outgoing call, then pulsed it's phone number to the base station. You'd get a dialtone, then rotary dial the number you wanted to call.

But -- it wasn't cellular. They'd use a ~250 watt base station and ~20 watt mobile, with *one* site covering the entire coverage area. There was a HF, VHF, and UHF band but all 3 put together only had like 32 channels.

You should see a place without it...

There's plenty of tech on the floor, but no phones. During breaks and lunch the hardest core phone addicts will (usually!) beat the cigarette smokers to the door and are texting or messaging (judging from the frantic tapping, beeps and dings) the whole time.

Wireless backhaul?

Maybe they don't use this in Britain? But, here in the US, as Verizon Wireless (among others) found areas where the wireline providers were unable to provide adequate backhaul (rurally, if there's no fiber nearby, the phone lines will be too long for fast DSL and ther'l be no cable.) Or unwilling (either they want too much money, or keep dragging their feet getting faster service installed.)

Solution? VZW (among others, I've heard T-Mobile US specifically) have been aggressively installing wireless backhaul (point-to-point microwave dishes) on every site -- sites that could not get good enough backhaul use it as their primary backhaul (and use the 1.5mbps or whatever wireline conection they already have hooked up as a backup), other sites can have good backhaul but use the wireless backhaul as a backup too (so ideally, a cut fiber will not disable service.) I've heard where I live, the main delay getting 3G (EVDO) service up was the (wireline) phone company being very slow in increasing backhaul speeds to the sites; so for 4G LTE, they got a big speed boost on the fiber optic line to like one site downtown (which does not use the phone company, it has fiber optics from another vendor), told the phone company to sit and spin on it and ran wireless backhaul from that site to the other sites in town.

The standard backhaul hardware now can hit 1gbps, it exists up to 10gbps, and less expensive 100mbps hardware also exists if the demand is less demanding (this also probably supports higher range.) These tend to list at least 25km range, with some claiming over 100km.

Man that's shitty...

Closing down around holidays? Makes sense. Demanding people use their paid time off to do it? Umm, no.

So greasy...

A) Who takes down a game network over Christmas, for any reason? Bah humbug.

B) Who decides they will bribe said greasy DDOSers? (This is not nearly as bad as the actual DDOS'ing though.)

C) Finally, it makes Lizard Squad double-greasy that they would accept this payment, then just start DDOS'ing again like 1 or 2 days later!

Re: North Korean ISPs

Firstly, I agree, this comment was obviously meant as an insult, but I don't think it's racial, I think they would have called Bush a "monkey in a tropical forest" too.

Second... I've heard some news-drones seeming to think it'd be very difficult to knock an *entire country's* internet offline. Normally it is... but what does North Korea have, like 1 leased line running in? I mean, last I heard even most "north korean" web sites were actually being served out of datacenters in China or Japan.

I wonder if this is a false flag operation? Some analysts suggest that the attack on Sony does not have the characteristics of a typical North Korean cyber-attack. And, a number of groups could DDOS service on the relatively small scale that North Korea has. But who would even benefit from souring relations with North Korea? The Russians? South Korea? Someone's just doing it for the lulz?

Yeah this is amusing

Yeah, this is honestly amusing. I see exactly zero business use for Facebook. (And I don't use it so I'm not going to be one of them rushing in because Facebook is blocked.) As zen1 alludes to, I can't think of a single application Facebook has that would be useful for business. And there are already services like LinkedIn that are FOR business-type use. I suppose I could be wrong, but I think if Facebook thinks they can horn in on this market that they are sorely mistaken.

What's the basis?

Is this based on number of employees hired? Is it possible FB has a nice big data center (and the juicy revenue they pull in from it) but very few actual employees? Honestly, either way, this is more a sign the "small business" criteria in AU should be changed than anything.

Agreed somehwat.

Agreed: re Chromebook. I don't feel like running a notebook that is limited to just running a browser and browser apps (more or less). The older ones were too low spec'ed for me to even want to run Linux on them, it looks like the newer ones are at least better in that regards, but I'd still find the low amount of storage (16GB or so) pretty limiting. I seriously doubt "Word and iTunes" literally means "Word and iTunes" (as opposed to a Word processor and music-handling app that don't look totally different than what one's used to) but still.

Disagree: re tablets. Very cheap tablets (like $40) now have a dual core ARM and 1GB (maybe 2GB) of RAM; ones closer to $80 or $90 still have a quad core ARM. It really doesn't matter if it's a Chinese chip nobody's heard of, nobody seems to be having trouble implementing a trouble-free ARM tablet chipset. (The Chinese MIPS-based tablets of a few years ago seem to be off the market as near as I can tell; THAT thing was a bit of a slug.) I've had no complaints with the performance of these and no longevity problems. Mom's Nexus 7 has a (slightly!) better...well, basically everything... but these $40-100 tablets these days are no slouch.

"So what exactly are you complaining about?"

It's highly likely that the actual inventors got some cash payment or bonus when they filed the patents; but nothing when Nortel went broke, nothing when Nortel sold the patents to Rockstar, nothing from the license fees paid to Rockstar, nothing when Rockstar sold some patents to patent trolls, nothing from the patent trolls license fees, nothing from the sale to RPX and nothing from the license fees paid to RPX. I can see the argument here that firms that hold patents but perform no R&D of their own are just a drain on the economy and invention process.

On the other hand, without companies being able to buy, sell, and resell these patents (so presumably they'd kind of evaporate when the company goes insolvent), it'd be FAR too easy to abuse THAT system by just forcing smaller companies (that perform R&D) into insolvency in order to use their patents for free. (I say "insolvency" rather than "bankruptcy" since a company might pull out of bankruptcy...)

Yeah...

Yeah, I like to occasionally run etherape; you scale it so normal traffic is a fairly thin line, and it becomes pretty apparent when something odd is going on; if a machine starts looking like missile command, it's got a virus or bittorrent running, if it's got some unusually high traffic going it's pretty apparent too.

I think this competition is amazing.

I think this competition is amazing; the amounts of processing power available these days is also amazing. These competitions push the state of the art of software (clustering, GPGPU/CUDA type setups), whatever software configuration tweaks and patches they make will come out and improve things for everyone. It also really pushes the state of the art of the hardware, showing which configurations work best for real workloads (speed and error-free execution).

Good work everyone!

"As Wi-Fi becomes increasingly popular for connecting to the Internet, it is imperative that the Commission clarify the rules of the road for Wi-Fi network operators,"

It's clear. FCC Part 15 section 5: "(a) Persons operating intentional or unintentional radiators shall not be deemed to have any vested or recognizable right to continued use of any given frequency by virtue of prior registration or certification of equipment, or, for power line carrier systems, on the basis of prior notification of use pursuant to § 90.35(g) of this chapter.

(b) Operation of an intentional, unintentional, or incidental radiator is subject to the conditions that no harmful interference is caused and that interference must be accepted that may be caused by the operation of an authorized radio station, by another intentional or unintentional radiator, by industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) equipment, or by an incidental radiator.

(c) The operator of a radio frequency device shall be required to cease operating the device upon notification by a Commission representative that the device is causing harmful interference. Operation shall not resume until the condition causing the harmful interference has been corrected."

================================

That is -- They are not permitted to produce harmful interference. (They are trying to claim forged deauth packets are not interference.) For Devil's Advocate purposes, let's pretend this argument is accepted. They still should not be permitted to do this, because the rest of Part 15 states that nobody (including Hilton or Marriott) has exclusive rights to this band, and that their equipment must accept interference from other devices on the band. Both of these alone are plenty good arguments that Hilton and Marriott are not permitted to try to kick everyone else off these bands.

I'd like to furthermore point out my computer is very well equipped with software; if you start deauthing me, I *will* detect this and will deauth you, and (if I can) I will crash your malfunctioning access points. I will also file an FCC complaint.

Starbuck(yes it's off topic)

"It didn't - the coffee is mediocre and overpriced and in Australia we don't really go for all the exotic 'coffee' drinks that Starbucks also provide."

Yeah I don't get it. I consider it polite to call the coffee mediocre -- I found it quite bad. And quite expensive. And the fancy drinks were loaded -- LOADED -- with pile after pile of sugars (plain ol' sugar, caramel, whipped cream, etc.) and VERY expensive. I don't understand how they stay in business personally. Honestly I find McDonalds coffee to be far better (no comment on the rest of the foods but the coffee there is good, cheap coffee.) And for Starbucks-price there is a local coffee shop with even better coffee choices.

I guess I'm not an afficionado?

I guess I'm not an afficionado... but

1) I just can't see having a bottom crust or not as that huge a deal (for savory pies -- I've never seen a fruit pie without a bottom crust.)

2) It seems like it's just as easy to ask "does it have a bottom crust?" if it's a big deal.

"Communication suppliers – historically willing facilitators of wiretapping – are “refusing to hand over evidence on the likes of drug smugglers or fraudsters” because they do not pose a “direct threat to life”, Telegraph security editor Tom Whitehead writes."

Yes. And the communications companies are right -- drug smugglers and fraudsters are not a direct threat to life. You want to track drug smugglers and fraudsters? GET A WARRANT.

"Swiss, et cetera have it right in matching the penalty to the goal of decreasing dangerous and unwanted behavior.

All that this creates is a situation whereby the rich people are the ones doing the speeding because they can afford it and also because they have very nice, very fast cars."

But at least they do have the "progressive" fines. Here in the US, 140kph in a 100 (well, 90 in a 65, we use MPH here thank you very much) would get a ~$300 fine (depends a lot on the state)... whether you might have $10 a month left over at the end of the month and that $300 is a crlppling fine, or your a multimillionaire and that $300 is a joke.

You guys whining about any and all speeding (and claiming going 1MPH over means your not controlling your car) sound like a bunch of wankers. There's times when traffic or weather conditions make it inappropriate to even approach the speed limit; there's places where the speed limit is simply higher than it should be (where the speed limit is appropriate on part of a road, but some part might have heavy turning traffic, or driveways, or just plain piss-poor rough road without reduced speed limit.) Other roads are set way too low for revenue generation, these speed limits are not set based on the proper legal basis of speed limits so there's really no reason to follow them if you can get away with it.

What you really need (and luckily we have here in the US) are actual police cars on the road. The most dangerous drivers I see are the ones who usually aren't even speeding... but when traffic thickens up and slows down, they are bouncing from lane to lane like speed-racer instead of waiting a minute or two for traffic to clear on it's own. A speed camera will NEVER catch this.

Of course, the worst are left-lane pacers (I guess for you that'd be right-lane pacers.) They really need to get tickets for obstructing traffic (and unfortunately they don't), they sit there and never get past whatever vehicle is in the right lane, just obliviously letting more and more traffic build up behind them for miles on end.

I agree with Redhat

I agree with Redhat's assessment. The wheel group is meant to be given only to users who are expected to have root access to the system. I.e.you give it to admins, not every user on the system. So, this particular package installer permits wheel-group users, if and only if they are logged into the physical console, to install packages without asking for a password. It's like being surprised that a Windows user who has been added to he Administrator group can perform Administrator activities; not particularly a surprise at all.

Doesn't sound too bad

I really hadn't heard any clear definitions (before) of what SDN was exactly, it sounded like a lot of unfinished software + hype. But it doesn't sound to bad to me from this description. To me, it sounds like the combination of (in summary):

1) The existing mechanisms various virtual machine environments have to allow these virtual machines to have their own MAC addresses and (if you want) VLAN tags.

2) "Q-in-Q" allowing a second layer of VLAN tags (802.11q) within a VLAN tag. So, "development" and "production" for example could each be on it's own VLAN. But "development" could then define their own VLANs within this VLAN, if (for example) you wanted to test something (with either physical or virtual hardware) that really should be on it's own LAN, without risk of it accidentally setting the "wrong" VLAN ID and stepping on production's toes.

3) Some kind of standardization in terms of how to deal with setting up and removing VLANs and "sub-VLANs" on the switches.

What I don't want is a picture is 2 or 3 (or like 10) times as bright as it is now. Avoiding having stuff get washed out is good though.

A note on this... when HD was somewhat new, there seemed to be a spate of films and shows where they went rather over the top on making everything razor sharp; eventually it was used to just present shows and movies at a higher resolution. My guess, if HDR catches on, there'll be a while where anywhere they'd use a lens flare, it'll be an astoundingly bright lens flare. I like the idea of having a bit better dynamic range between "almost black" and "black" though.

Over the long term (like 20 years), these companies have kind of taken turns... sometimes a company had a production problem, bad batches and so on; sometimes they try to push the bit density a bit too high before the next generation technology comes out.

Oh, and occasional firmware failures... I had a drive back in the day, 420MB WD AC2420, that I got replaced under warranty 3 times (after the 1st replacement failed I used the replacement as a spare...) So, after a few weeks or a month it'd get a bad sector or two; not uncommon at the time (they'd gone from the printed factory defect list to remapping them at the factory, but no SMART yet, so you'd use DOS or Linux's bad block handling to map out any other bad sectors.) Once it got 1 or 2 bad sectors, you had about a week... the bad sectors didn't grow, but (even if you mapped them out!) it'd start repeatedly whacking the heads against the side of the case, and you'd get a 25% drive failure as 1 of the 4 heads could take no more. Unfortunately each replacement I got had older firmware than the last, because apparently this drive is known online for it's longevity.

Nevertheless, there's an awful lot of consolidation in the drive market and I'm not too chuffed with the idea of WD taking over HGST either.

Thanks Microsoft for stopping this policy

"Also.. when did Microsoft ever give Windows away for free ?"

If you read TFA, they started giving Windows (8/8.1 I suppose) away for free starting in April for OEMs making devices with under 9 inch screens. They have either significantly discounted or given away Windows 7 and XP in the past as well.

For example, netbooks were shipping with Linux; Microsoft basically killed the netbook market by 1) Releasing Windows cheap or free for them... I think then itwas also based on 9-inch screen limit and 1GB RAM limit (initially Windows XP, well after the point when they were supposedly going to stop selling it) ... 2) Vendors found the netbook than ran Linux fine was inadequate for running Windows (especially Windows 7). 3) The OEMs then bumped the specs up on these netbooks, all of a sudden that ~$200 netbook cost like $500+, which put it out of the price range of really being considered a netbook; so they no longer sold well.

I'm pleased that Microsoft has given up on this ploy. Please, Microsoft, play fair in the market, give people Windows if they want and let them not get Windows if they don't want it. Thanks.

"If sales taxes were also imposed on online sales, it might even spark competition between states to pass low online-only taxes as a way to drive business to their jurisdictions."

Well, the problem is, the sales tax is supposed to be paid based on where the stuff is going, not where your business is located.

Municipalities already bend over backwards to say "Well, we won't charge your business x, y, or z taxes if you move it here." (usually property taxes and some other tax breaks.) And then, in some cases, act surprised when it doesn't work out... The city of Dubuque here in Iowa is STILL complaining about Google... the city offered all these tax breaks since Google was going to bring hundreds of jobs (based on the size of the buliding, assuming it was going to have a factory inside or something.) Google straight up TOLD the city, *multiple times* during this process, that it was largely automated and would hire 50 people max. The city stuck fingers in their ears and kept claiming the hundreds of jobs would be so great, it came as this big surprise to the city when they actually hired like 50 people like they said they (repeatedly!) said they would.

As for Democrats versus Republicans... well, that's the US's broken political system. We effectively have a single-party system, both parties favor large, intrusive, and expensive government, while blaming the other party for all the country's problems. Even though these two parties political views are almost identical* (compared to what is available in a proper democracy with wildly different political parties), well, look at the comments... people will defend their almost-identical political party, swear up and down it's SO different, say the members of the other are party are wingnuts, fascists, hippies, use "liberal" and "conservative" like swear words, blame that other party for all the problems, and sooner or later start swearing at each other. Oh and swear at anyone looking in from the outside pointing out how screwed up it all is. US politics are truly dreary and awful. I say this as a Libertarian.

*I'm not saying they are 100% identical. But, they're closer than is healthy compared to places with like 5 or 6 parties in the mix.

What is the root problem? Polls and reporting. When an election comes up, the polls will ask ONLY if people are voting for the republican candidate or the democratic candidate -- not even "or somebody else". If you plan to vote for ANYONE else, they'll either no record anything at all for you, or say that means you're "undecided". No, I'm not undecided, I'm not voting for either main party! We've occasionally had third-party candidates hit 20%+ of the vote (and win in a few jurisdictions.) They'll show up as 0 on the polls (since the poll excludes the possibility of a third party), the news will report the poll result just claiming high numbers of "undecied" voters up to the point they get surprised by the election results; and in debates, it's strictly republican+democrat, the third party candidates are NEVER invited. This then feeds into this sick view I've heard from some that they can't stand either main-party candidate, but they are "throwing their vote away" if they vote for someone they actually want in office because they don't have a chance of winning (of course, for some odd reason, this doesn't stop the republicans in places that are like 75% democrat -- or vice versa -- from voting even though their candidate has no chance of winning.)

"Why am i using docker over just packaging an application as a meta-package depending on the bits I need.

So if i only want a sane webserver setup, I package corp-httpd and job done.

The only hard bit is to decide what a host will do, and that can be a shell script that sets a hostname and installs on first boot."

Packaging your application as a meta-package works fine for making your package easy to install on Linux distros that use the same package format as yours.

If you have (for political or business reasons, it really doesn't matter) multiple groups who cannot even agree on what distro they want to use but they don't want two largely-idle servers... well, the one group can use Redhat Enterprise Linux, the other can use Ubuntu, and more or less pretend they each have their own server. This isn't really possible without containerization or virtualization.

There's also the case of sloppy commercial software that the vendor won't support unless it's on "it's own" computer. If that's because they judge resource usage to be so intense it needs it's own machine, I don't expect them to support it under Docker either, you're still effectively violating the system requirements whether a second daemon is running in Docker or bare metal. if the software requires "it's own" computer because the installer's an unholy mess that spams the filesystem, or it requires particular versions of some libraries but doesn't include them in it's own private /.../lib directory, well, Docker would be perfect for that (just as chroot jails were effective for this in the past.)

Would this work?

Would this work? Honestly, the few times I've been on the train, I have not felt like talking to anyone. If anything, I'd want to get some work done or zone out before getting to work; which I don't need a special train car to do.

System updates

Yeah, I always assume any phone or tablet I get will have the capabilities it has NOW. Too many vendors never ship any updates.

Not just the Chinese vendors; I've never had a phone yet that got an actual Android update... my Droid 2 Global got an update from 2.2 to still 2.2... I got it up to 2.3.something using Cyanogenmod. My previous phone got no Android version update at all, but updated the LTE radio firmware. My current phone got updated from 4.1.2 to still 4.1.2, but using a newer radio ROM.

So.. if I get a phone *assuming* it'll get an Android update or two, I'll be sorely disappointed when it doesn't. If I make sure the version it *ships* with is at least "new enough", then I can't be disappointed, but may get a pleasant surprise if there's a nice upgrade down the road.

(Of course, the "Google phones" are the exception -- since Google *will* ship updates for them for a certain length of time, I wouldn't sweat buying one expecting future updates.)

What are they talking about?

My question, what are they talking about? After reading both the El Reg article, and the Arxan site, I can't tell.

By a "hacked" app, do they mean:

1) Exploits exist against an application, so unauthorized information can be retrieved from the application and phoned home to some naughty malware author?

2) The unauthorized copies of these applications have various malware added into them?

3) Just like cracked PC software; the "adding or modifying many attributes and behaviours that the app did not originally have, such as having security controls bypassed or unauthorised functions" means bypassing licensing checks and enabling the paid features you wouldn't get otherwise (in the case of apps with a free and feature-added pay version)?

Don't get me wrong, the software on offer from Arxan appears to be meant to harden Android apps, so it would likely help against all of those 3 scenarios (make it harder to exploit, harder to crack, and so harder to ship "malware added" versions of the software too.) But I'd be more worried about loads of exploitable apps than finding out that dodgey free versions of paid software exist (which honestly wouldn't surprise me much at all.)

"Most people run Windows on their PCs because they have no real choice. When people are given a choice very few people chose Windows"

Yup, I've gotten plenty of "Don't you hate it when your computer..." (insert laundry list of Windows-only problems, real or imagined.) I reply "My computer doesn't do that, I'm not running Windows, those problems are all Windows-specific."

Anyway... OneDrive. What would be so hard about having a choice -- the "remote-only files aren't visible" for those users who want it, and the choice of showing *all* files but having remote-only files greyed out to indicate they aren't there yet. If you had an internet connection, it'd retrieve the file when you go to open it; or you'd right click the file or files and choose to retrieve a copy now if you need them pre-retrieved. *shrug*. I dunno, I just thought this kind of thing (distributed file system with offline capability) was the kind of thing that had been solved decades ago, with giving it a nice UI the only thing that needs to be worked out. But it sounds like Microsoft has released a suite of incompatible products under the OneDrive name and now trying to mash them together. Yeah.

Difference between this and virtualization

In a virtual environment, you either have Type I (bare metal) hypervisor or Type II (runs on top of an OS). VirtualBox for instance is Type II. Either way, you end up having a speed hit for any kernel code, although with modern tech like VT-X it's much lower.

First assume zero overhead. Your application generates requests. The requests are processed by the virtual machine kernel and passed to the virtual machine drivers. The drivers get the data to the hypervisor, the hypervisor passes along requests to the kernel and the real kernel's drivers finish the requests. There could also be dual caching as the VM kernel and real kernel both cache data.

In a container, your app generates requests; there's a little overhead while some layer vets the requests to ensure one doesn't break out of the jail; they're passed to the kernel and the driver finishes the requests. Much fewer steps.

In reality, virtio network and disk drivers can cut the virtual machine driver overhead down quite a bit; without it the virtual machine drivers and hypervisor are faffing about with various registers and whatever emulating a real network card, SATA controller, IDE controller, or SCSI controller. You also usually have to statically allocate RAM to VMs, whereas with containers you can set RAM usage limits but you otherwise just have a pool of available RAM.

Seems to me...

Seems to me (as a few commenters have commented),the current feature set (SATA port, gigabit ethernet, but not working video accel) makes this sutiable as a nice little server. Looks like the VPU is not supported yet. I wonder if ffmpeg is built with NEON support, that would provide a good speedup.

SL failed because Flash was multiplatform

"I can understand the Silverlight debacle; they tried to replace Flash and didn't notice that plugin-based RIAs were going to disappear altogether as a category in a few more years. It was a mistake, but this sort of stuff happens."

I'd say, more accurately, they thought they could displace Flash; but in their arrogance, they failed to notice that the Windows-only plugins that preceded Flash were displaced by Flash BECAUSE of it being ported to multiple platforms. They thought they could displace multi-platform Flash with Windows-only Silverlight, and use it as a disincentive against using anything but Windows to surf the web. HTML5-style functionality wasn't really a factor back when SL came out.

At the time SL came out, Flash supported Windows back to Win98, OS9, OSX, Linux, Solaris, and I think a few other UNIXes. Silverlight supported Windows 2000 on up. And a little later a somewhat buggy OSX port. Moonlight (based on Mono) doesn't really count, I tried it on Linux and it didn't actually work; I got ONE demo (that showed a cube) to load, a second demo that just showed a single triangle failed; I never saw a single Silverlight-based site (the few that there were) work under Moonlight before I removed it as a waste of space.

"The real question is .Net going to still be relevant by the time its been fully developed and is truly production ready on non MS platforms.? After the Silverlight debacle Microsoft has in past given mixed signals about .Net's long term future. In some ways this may turn out just like it did with Symbian."

To be honest, i've done some test programming with C#, it's fine. I must agree about the mixed signals though, I had though .NET was considered essentially defunct, that Microsoft was done with it and .NET 4.5 was it.

I don't really develop for Windows, other than dipping my toes now and then. But, I certainly do hope for Windows developer's sake that Microsoft comes out with SOME kind of clearer roadmap.

When I did some Windows development recently, I decided to find out what the "best practices" were; since I was starting from scratch, why use outmoded and no longer recommended toolkits and techniques? Well, I found no recommendation, every desktop toolkit was either formally deprecated or not really deprecated but they were making it clear(ish) that development was done. Some developers said the newer toolkits weren't feature-complete and to use the older formally deprecated ones. Very confusing. The only formally recommended development path at that point was to develop Metro apps, which I was obviously not going to do since a) I don't think enough people had Windows 8 then or indeed now, and I don't have a Windows 8 VM either for that matter. b) I didn't like any aspect of any Metro app I've ever seen, since it's not really a desktop interface but a tablet interface forced onto a desktop.

So I decided on WPF (despite it also being considered to be kind of on life support on that point) and found it acceptable; XAML and WPF reminded me the most of the old Swing toolkit for Java. However, I can see where people could find it inflexible for their purposes. But again, even WPF was not recommended at that point, and indeed it sounded like even .NET was kind of being placed on life support (although specific addons like Entity Framework were even then clearly still being actively developed.)

At least Microsoft has indicated they will continue to work on WPF and .NET, giving SOME kind of guidance.

Something else to watch/listen for...

Something else to watch/listen for.. I had a HD enclosure (not a NAS, but I'm sure this could happen on some NAS systems too) that was using dual hard drives, to provide double capacity (i.e. not mirrored.) THE NUMPTIES DIDN'T USE AN UPGRADED POWER SUPPLY.

So, after a while, it was effectively providing the drives with a "brownout" amount of power. You get fair warning, the drives did not sound healthy for a few days, and the power supply was audibly hissing. I ordered a replacement power supply... basically, they went bad like clockwork about every 6 months due to probably being inadequate rating for the power used. On the second power supply, before I realized what was happening, the motor on one drive burned out, and the other drive was damaged (anywhere it had written when it did not have enough power was irrecoverably mapped out as a bad sector; whether there was REAL damage or not, the drive used up it's spare sectors, so it had *visible* bad sectors (that would not map out any more due to the spares being used up), and would not even try to zero out these bad sectors and mark them no longer bad if I zeroed the disk. Boo.)

"Indeed, much as the idea of Aereo was innovative and no doubt a valuable service to the people that used it, it was piracy of the TV companies' signals that it was selling."

Nonsense, there was no piracy involved whatsoever; it was taking over-the-air signals, that to remind you anyone in the area could receive over the air; and making those signals available on the person's device of choice.

To be honest, I'm not surprised this service was shut down; however, I see it as really a disservice to both the TV viewing public and to the stations themselves (although they did not see it that way.) It sounds like the most common use of this service was to watch *live* TV (advertisements and all!) on devices that otherwise would be unable to receive TV at all. To me, this would be a win-win, increasing viewership of the station.

As for the antenna... given the description, I have my doubts if it was actually functional or not as opposed to being an attempt to work around some outdated law or other; you can use an arbitrarily small antenna if your signal strength is pretty high. I know in my market, a postage stamp sized antenna would get zero stations, no matter what technological trickery you claim to use with it.

How about the exhaust?

You know how those fry oil-powered diesel vehicles kind of smell like french fries? Yeah, hows the exhaust from this bus smell? 8-)

(In all seriousness I do suppose it smells like nothing at all. But I'm surprised that exhaust from biodiesel vehicles smells like anything identifiable either, so I don't really know.)

What they must realize

What they must realize, is the internet routes around damage; and censorship is regarded by some users as damage. The GFW is ineffective to anyone who wishes to get around it; if a Wuzhen Declaration encouraging allowing countries to implement widespread censorship passes then users will simply ignore it and work around it.

Of course, a clause trying to reduce the spread of pornography is pretty useless, there's so much pornography already online I don't know if there's anywhere further for it to spread (edit: El Reg, you're welcome to accept this as a challenge and spice things up with a Page 3 girl if you wish. Just kidding, that may not go over too well 8-) . Re-edit: Of course this is a problem with this kind of declaration; I'm sure the Page 3 girl is just considered racy in UK; in France or wherever it may not even be that racy. In US, we're prudes and I think it'd be unheard of to have a photo topless woman outside of the likes of Playboy. And the kind of people who would want to significantly restrict online pornography to begin with, instead of realize adults are adults, probably would want to go for the lowest common denominator.. worst case you'd end up not being able to show exposed ankles. ) And, again, any attempt to restrict products and services that people want to get to, they will get to it anyway.

" Consider making the lid of your laptop computer a solar panel, one that can be flipped up to collect energy when the screen is open."

They did consider that in a sense I think; solar panels, the generators in wind farm wind mills, use rare earth metals, and more power regulation and power storage hardware would have to be put into the grid. The existing solar and wind arms may well save more CO2 than used to make them, since they are in pretty ideal sun and wind locations. Once you try to replace a large percentage of current power usage with it though, the prime spots would be taken and you'd have some panels and windmills not contributing that much power. I think a laptop solar panel sounds cool, but honestly mine's almost always indoors or in a bag.

And yeah, my understanding is that the conventional reactor produces these depleted fuel rods as waste, a breeder reactor will use the depleted rods as fuel and you end up with nice hot plutonium fuel rods to go back into the conventional reactor. But, some percentage of this plutonium is weapons grade, so reprocessing depleted rods was stopped dead in it's tracks years ago and it's all stored away. Some of the reactors running presently, the designs are not as safe as they could be and they are getting very old; it would be a good idea to decommission them eventually. But even 1980s-era (as opposed to 1960s-1970s) designs were much safer (Chernobyl used a 1973-era design with a few later 1970s revisions), newer design reactors are particularly safe.

I was surprised they didn't do this before...

I was surprised they didn't do this earlier... xxx or xxxx is the build number... Windows NT 3.1 used 3.1.xxx kernel vesion; NT 3.5 used 3.5.xxxx and 3.51 3.51.xxxx kernel versions. NT 4.0 used 4.0.xxxx kernel version, and Windows 2000 5.0.xxxx kernel version. This is quite sensible. THEN:

XP 5.1.xxxx

Server 2003, XP 64-bit 5.2.xxxx

Vista 6.0.xxxx

Windows 7 6.1.xxxx

Windows 8 6.2.xxxx

Windows 8.1 6.3.xxxx

So, I guess since "XP", "2003", and "Vista" aren't really numerical version numbers anyway.. whatever. But I really don't know why.... wwhhhhhhhhyyyyy..... they didn't have WIndows 7 have a 7.0.xxxx kernel, given that the previous version already had a 6.0.xxxx kernel. Windows 8 then could have had an 8.0.xxxx kernel and 8.1 8.1.xxxx. Oh well, giving Windows 10 a 10.0.xxxx kernel, better late than never.

"My Nexus 5 ran like crap for about an hour after the update. Swiping between screens juddered, the lock screen would take a few seconds to respond to pin code input. I'm assuming it was just doing something silently in the background because the next morning it was back to buttery smooth."

You know what it probably is? I don't think Lollipop uses Dalvik VM any more, the phone probably boots up then is rebuilding all those apps. Or it's doing the encryption. I assume it wouldn't take that long to go through pictures.. but it depends how many are on there. When it's going to update whatever, it probably should probably do a notification that it's updating your (whatever it's updating) so you know that's why it's slow. Good to know, I don't have to warn my mom off updating hers 8-).

"Intriguing news item but colour me cynical, I have to wonder how “perpetual” storage will pan out in the real world. Is this perchance a marketing spin?"

Some companies prefer the predictable costs of an all-inclusive M&S (maintenance and support) contract over the probably lower overall costs but more unpredictable of paying for replacement kit all at once. They could make plenty of margin (profit) and still get plenty of customers. Flash prices are dropping, controller prices will be stable or (most likely) drop, and if the customer needs a higher performance controller, and more storage, I'm sure they will pay more for M&S on that next contract.

Openstack's storage (like ZFS, and some other cluster or high reliability storage systems), lets you add devices at will (to add more space), remove devices, and offline bad devices, and have the storage be spread out over whatever kind of network of computers you've got (obviously the faster the better.) Using it as a basis for a flash storage system should make maintenance pretty easy (it could either offline flash automaticcally as it approaches the wear limit, using new flash they periodically put in; or they may remove them manually from the pool and add new flash to replace them.) The actual maintenance of an Openstack system is not too difficult, it'd be nice for a field tech to work with I think.

10 years ago, Detroit looked post-apocalyptic

I just have to laugh about someone trying to extort a bankrupt city. I guess it doesn't cost them anything to do it, but... .they (finally!) formally declared bankruptcy a year or two ago, they would be unable to pay this ransom no matter how important the database is.

===========

My trip to Detroit

Seriously, it's possible Detroit is in better shape now (and I have heard some of the TARP bailout money that was not wasted paying off incompetent banks did go to road repair specifically in the Detroit area)... but when I was there about 10 years ago, the highway (this was 100% overpass, i.e. elevated roadway, bridge) was so rough I hit my head on the rough of the car; I was a bit alarmed to look out and realize some of the potholes had NO CONCRETE LEFT AT ALL and the tires were running on metal rebar, I could see THROUGH the bridge*. When I got to my friend's house and we went to get on the highway, we found nearest onramp to my friends house had a "road closed" sign with a pile of rubble, the onramp had collapsed. The next one, my friend and I debated if we should go fast and get up the ramp before it (potentially) collapsed, or go slow to minimize the chance of collapsing it (he went for slow.) Off the highway, I drove through blocks of cracked road with what looked like 5 or 6 foot grass on each side, the buildings had collapsed and grass grown back over the foundations. One street was flooded due to a broke water main -- when I left a few days later, the water had not even been shut off let alone any repairs being done. The buildings that were left, about 1 or 2 per block were in good shape, the rest had broken out windows and so on. To me, it seriously looked like I was driving through a post-apocalyptic city that had been leveled by an atomic bomb 30 or 40 years previously and never rebuilt. It didn't look as bad as the random rubble in the Terminator movies, but worse than the "post-disaster" cities I've seen in most any other movie; amusingly the supposedly run down due to bankruptcy Detroit in Robocop looks WAAAAY nicer than the reality.

*Two other people I know who went there around 10 years ago... one did major damage to his front end, he hit a piece of concrete that had broken out and was sitting on the road... probably he should have seen it, but what can I say, he is the kind of driver that would not notice. The other person bent up all 4 rims on his Acura on the way into Detroit, got them replaced, and the replacements got all bent up on the way *out* of Detroit and he had to replace them a 2nd time when he got home.

end trip to Detroit

===================

"Feel free to be smug but Office 97 is".. actually I wouldn't object to that, although they probably should be using LibreOffice or the like.

But, they shouldn't be running that old of *server* software (the server software was branded "Office" or "BackOffice" back then), and should probably not be running Microsoft server software to begin with if cash strapped; since, after all, running an e-mail server and calendar sync is simply not rocket science, and you can (legally) get up to date, secure software to do it if you stay away from Microsoft products.

"How do you seize a database? " Probably either encrypted it, or deleted it and said they'd give back a copy. The concern about confidential data being leaked is of course legitimate.